by Alan Lee
I followed it, enjoying the rocks and hard dirt under my feet instead of wet leaves. The path ran up and around a knoll and there I came to…
37.1612
-80.1716
No wonder Ulysses had marked this place with GPS coordinates. It was nowhere.
Another couple minutes of walking and I saw through the trees…something. Signs of ancient civilization? I approached and listened and detected no life.
It was a Jeep and the remains of an old wooden building, so hidden they didn’t appear on Google Earth. Probably a hunting shed. A fire had eaten most and only one wall still stood. The floors were rotten and yielding to the earth. It’d been erected in a clearing with no foundation other than cinderblocks. No generator, no power lines.
The Jeep Wrangler looked like a model only five years old, but now beyond repair. Animals had burrowed in and torn up the seats and built nests. I opened the driver door and things rustled in the back. The hinges complained. No keys in sight. The glove compartment was open, and resting on top of the user manual I found the faded registration.
This vehicle was registered to…Ulysses Steinbeck.
Zounds.
Eureka.
Elementary.
The inspection ran out three years ago. It’d been sitting here ever since the time of his accident, I bet.
Okay, Ulysses. This place would be hard to find, even following that old ATV trail. But you didn’t want to forget it, thus the GPS numbers. You planned on returning. Why?
In the back seat I saw a fiberglass handle. I grabbed and lifted and was holding a shovel in decent shape. I used it to scrape out the car of debris and nests, sending small rodents scampering and releasing a rich odor of life and animal waste. The Jeep was essentially empty.
I kicked around the ruined shed and scrapped soggy boards aside. The wooden fibers parted and fell. Buried underneath old shingles I found a bizarre contraption connected to a battery coated with acid. I sat in a dry spot and poked through the mess of wires and saw…needles? I picked up metal parts and discarded them. What were these, maybe bottles of…ink, maybe? All the labels were gone. Needles and ink and this powered contraption…
I felt confident I’d discovered a tattoo kit. A do-it-yourself machine. I’d bet five bucks a forensic technician could look through this quagmire and locate the remnants of animal tranquilizer. And probably a razor to shave a dog, and some disinfectant.
Ulysses had brought GPS here, knocked her out, shaved her, and tattooed her with the coordinates. That would be a doozy of a journal entry.
I poked through the rest of the remains. Found an old cast-iron pan and a stainless steel mug. Some other stuff I couldn’t identify. I walked the perimeter of the ruins and saw nothing. I circled it again looked and thought.
What had I learned?
Ulysses Steinbeck had a secret shed.
But it was nearly impossible to get here. In fact, I bet he’d gotten lost a few times finding it. So he’d come up here with a puppy in the Jeep and a tattoo kit. Once here, he used a GPS device to determine the latitude and longitude and he’d tattooed it onto the side of a dog. Much easier to find now. And he returned home without the Jeep.
To a well-trained and keen eye like mine, it all made sense.
Except not really, no it didn’t.
What on earth, Ulysses.
I got lost getting back to my car. Took an hour longer than it should.
This is why Gandalf never asked me to help.
25
Kix and I played with Georgina Princess at the park off Grandin until dusk. GPS reacted with dignity and polite interest at the sight of other dogs, but she much preferred the company of my son and me. We threw a ball and pushed on the swing and slid down slides until we couldn’t see one another, and decided hours spent thusly were the reason we existed.
Timothy August made chicken soup with cauliflower instead of noodles. Manny and I ate with him and Stackhouse until he claimed he could do more pushups than me, and we had to quit to determine supremacy. I collapsed at fifty. He stopped at fifty-five, though he could’ve kept going. I laid on the floor gasping. He hopped up and kept eating.
“It’s because,” I said. I sounded like someone with a cervix dilated to ten centimeters and pushing. “It’s because you’re skin and bones. While I’m hauling a lot more muscle around.”
Manny ate soup and watched me on the floor. “Hey muscles, you need CPR?”
“I might.”
Kix laughed and pointed.
Georgina Princess nuzzled my ear.
That evening I sat on the couch with my laptop and I surfed to Roanoke County’s online recorder of deeds, and I zoomed in on the map to Ulysses’s GPS coordinates.
One guy owned all that land. Hundreds of acres. Larry Alexander. I Googled him and discovered a Larry Alexander living in Roanoke, using the white pages. The white pages! Online phonebooks still had use, who knew. Glanced at my watch; it was too late to call.
Veronica Summers parked her car and came in after nine. She came straight to my couch, kissed me on the mouth, curled up with her head in my lap and said, “I don’t want to talk. I just want to be.”
After a minute she rearranged, pulling a throw pillow under her head, still on my lap, and said, “This house. It gets me every time.”
She fell asleep soon after, breathtaking in repose.
I rested my arm around her and changed the television to SportsCenter and watched basketball highlights and wondered what during the course of her day had wiped her out and decided it didn’t matter because I was willing to spend the rest of my evenings on couches with her, no matter the reasons.
26
Saturday, I took Kix to Wasena park. Georgina Princess joined and so did Ronnie, holding GPS by the leash until we reached a deserted field between the tennis courts and baseball diamond. I threw the tennis ball and she raced for it.
Georgina, not Ronnie.
Kix stumbled after GPS and I threw the ball again when it was returned, and the poor boy never seemed to catch up.
Manny and Beck arrived, stepping out of the supercharged American sports car and wearing marshal gear. Manny ran in a large circle with GPS and I said, “Look at them as they gyre and gimble in the wabe.”
Beck wrinkled her nose. “Is that another language?”
“No, philistine. It’s poetry.”
Soon Manny and Veronica were both kneeling and playing with the dog and Kix. They spoke to her in high-pitched voices and I noted with despair, “They are descending into anarchy.”
“You don’t like her?” said Beck.
“I do. Far more than I anticipated. But why do they squeak around her?”
“Manny and Veronica? That’s how you reward a dog. Look how much she likes it.”
“Dogs are rewarded by high-pitched voices?” I said.
“Don’t you use a more excited voice when Kix needs a reward?”
“That hypothetical situation hasn’t happened yet. He’s an abject sinner.”
She laughed. Because I’m so funny.
“That’s not true. Kix is great,” she said. “But the voice might be hard for you. Yours is deeper than most.”
I swelled with pride. Yeah it was.
Beck pointed at the dog. “See how she watches you? And runs over here occasionally? She likes you. You’re the alpha.”
“Because I feed her, probably.”
“Maybe. I’m no expect. I just grew up with dogs in the house.”
That evening I sat with the dog and petted her, and debated the merits of pet versus petted as the past tense verb, and decided I disliked both. I assumed a falsetto—a manly one, which made it okay—and told her she was a good girl. She opened her mouth and it seemed to be a smile, which was impossible I thought, but the impression remained; she was happy.
It snowed the next day, but lightly, and we went to church. Ronnie accompanied, humoring me. She once said, “Any God who truly loves me needs to have his halo adjusted.�
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“After reading about him, I find his affection for us to be irresponsible and reckless.”
“Like how you feel about Kix.”
“Potentially more so.”
“I suppose if you’re going to believe in some weird religion, you may as well choose the most affectionate deity,” said Ronnie.
Though blasphemer, she looked good in a pew. Her dress exposed her shoulders and somehow on her the naked shoulders and neck looked scandalous, and the nearby parishioners had trouble focusing.
Was parishioner correct? I still had no great handle on the lexicon. Member of the congregation? One of the flock?
I sat next to Marcus Morgan. Ronnie sat on the far side, near his wife Courtney so they could whisper.
The rector (pastor? priest? clergy? ecclesiastic?) taught sanctification and the necessary byproducts of suffering. Marcus nodded enthusiastically and called an, “Amen!” which seemed to shock the stoic gathering but please the man at the mic.
After church we all took naps. In bed, under the covers, she murmured into the small of my neck, “That man is insane.”
“How so?”
“Suffering is the worst.”
“Does it not strengthen us? He claims so.”
“My suffering didn’t, I don’t think. Drove me near to suicide.” Her eyes were closed, her hand under my shirt and resting on my abdomen.
“I think what he wanted to say was, even the hard things in life can be redeemed if you find meaning and growth. Holy moments can be found in the dark and scrape away the dross.”
“I like that. But does it matter?”
“Maybe. What is life other than a series of moments? Other than the unstoppable sequence of events in which we constantly change? And if we have no choice but to change, it’s important to be changing upward instead of downward. And if we take control of every moment, instead of letting it control us, and if we decide the series of moments can be redeemed, even the dark ones, then our life is better,” I said, wondering if I should process these things more thoroughly before uttering them out loud.
“Wow. Did that pastor guy say all that? Was that his point?”
“No but it should have been. I don’t think he carried his argument far enough to the highest possible conclusions.”
She yawned. “Mackenzie.”
“Yes Ronnie.”
“Sometimes I remember how intelligent you are. How profound and deep, and I realize that you are outthinking everyone else around you. And I get all goosebumpy because you want to be with me.”
“Objection, goosebumpy is not a word.”
“Um, how about, galvanized? Or indicted?"
“Much better.”
“Mackenzie.” Very soft now.
“Yes Ronnie.”
“Moments like this are holy for me. Or as close as I’ll ever get.”
In the next room, Kix shouted at GPS and threw toys.
“Dog. Fish! Fish dog.”
Georgina Princess patiently fetched the toys, raised up to place her front paws on the rim of the pack ’n play and dropped the toys back in, and Kix did it again and again until he grew sleepy and we were content.
27
I called Larry Alexander. From the sound of it, Larry was maybe eighty-five and attached to an oxygen machine.
“Sorry to bother you, Mr. Alexander. I happened to be hiking through the woods and got lost and ended up on your property recently on top of Bent Mountain.”
The voice on the other end made a chuckling sound. “Oh. That’s okay. Mighty fine of you to let me know, but…oh, I got so much land that I don’t know what to do with. Expect I’ll give it to my son and he won’t know either.” He chuckled some more.
“I noticed a burned down shed and old Jeep, not far from a trail I used. Any idea the story?”
“Yeah, I do…let’s see, maybe I can…maybe I can remember.” There were some scratching sounds. “Yeah, I do, so…a friend of mine, no, that’s not it…my nephew uses the land to hunt. Fine with me. And he’s got, what do you call them, lodges maybe, scattered about. Few years back, a friend of mine asked if he could make use of one, and he went up there in the Jeep, but…as I recall he got into an automobile crash, and…well, the Jeep’s still there. And, oh let’s see, I heard about a year later from my nephew, his name’s Shannon, Shannon told me the shed burned down but the Jeep survived, so…I guess it’ll just set there and rot until the end of time.” More chuckling.
“These things happen, I guess.”
“Yes, I guess they do,” said Larry.
“What was your friend doing in the Jeep up at the shed? Hunting, I suppose?”
“No, don’t think so. He was a, well, a learned man who didn’t care to hunt. I expect he just liked to get away. You know? Get out of the city now and then.”
“I know the feeling.”
“Poor man, not sure what happened to him after the accident.”
That’s funny, Larry Alexander, because I’m not sure what happened to him before it.
I had questions.
I needed answers.
Ulysses wouldn’t have them. He couldn’t remember them, after all. But it was his door I knocked upon later that day.
Rose let me in, looking pleased to see me. As always, she was barefoot.
“Perfect timing, Mr. August. He woke from a nap an hour ago.”
I paused in the foyer. “Rose, I am confused about something. You were the housekeeper, right?”
“I was. Before the accident.” she said. “I still am, I suppose."
“And then the ex-wife and daughter asked you to move in and provide full-time care.”
“Yes.”
“Why you? Don’t take it personally, but I wouldn’t think to ask a housekeeping professional to provide medical attention.”
“Ah. Yes.” She smiled and placed her hand on my arm for a brief moment. Probably to verify bicep circumference and brag to her friends. “I see your confusion, Mr. August. I am a certified nurse. I used to work part-time with hospice, and while at homes I cleaned when I grew bored and the nicer families would tip me for the service. Word spread enough so that I was doing both jobs.”
“Ah hah.”
“You see?”
“I do.”
“Mr. Steinbeck and his ex-wife offered to pay me better than I was making before at both. His insurance helps, of course. It’s enough to help my son through college.”
“I didn’t know you had one.”
“Yes, Jason.” She smiled the biggest smile I’d seen yet. “He’s at UVA. He is my joy.”
She led me to the office where Ulysses Steinbeck sat at a chair near the fire reading a book. “Ulysses? Mackenzie August to see you.” She took three journals from his desk and placed them on his chair’s side table.
Ulysses stood and shook my hand, and smiled politely and without recognition. He glanced at the two whiteboards in the room, read the information, and said, “Thank you, Rose.”
She left.
He indicated the journals. “Before we speak, Mr. August, I need to refresh my memory.”
I sat in the opposite chair. “I know the drill, Dr. Steinbeck. Happy to wait and enjoy your fire until you’re ready.”
“I recognize your cologne.”
“The reason I wore it.”
“Very helpful.” He glanced in What Is Happening Now and noted I wasn’t scheduled. He muttered my name a few times and flipped backwards in the journal, scanning each page. He spoke softly to himself and I couldn’t make out the words. He found me from last week and said, “Ah. Ah hah, yes. Okay. Good, good. Mr. August, yes, nice to see you again. You’re finding the dog.”
“I’m here to update you and seek counsel.”
He smiled the smile of a man still catching up. “By all means. I’m hazy on the details but I know I’m eager for news about the dog.”
“We have a weird situation here, Dr. Steinbeck, because it’s almost like I have two clients.”
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�Explain.”
“You hired me to find the dog. But you don’t know why. You’re hoping the reason becomes apparent and when it does you’re hoping I’ll know what to do.”
He nodded. “My notes say you are trustworthy.”
“It’s a little like you hired me to help your past self. Because your past self knew things you currently don’t. But your past self has no agency here, other than me. And your current self doesn’t know the answers. And now I know some of them, and you’re hoping the right thing will be done, even if you don’t know what it is and even though you can’t really control things. Make sense?”
He had been scratching notes in his journal. He paused and considered me. “I often experience this dilemma. It’s a helpless and frustrating sensation.”
“Considering your plight and the fact that I have control right now, I want you to know I’m doing my best.”
“You have control.”
“Yes, organic but not permanent.”
He made a humming noise. Looked at his notes. Looked at the board again. Sighed with displeasure. “You’re asking for more money.”
“No.”
“Then…”
“I’ve been paid and paid well. I’m not here to extort you.”
“Okay.” He fidgeted in the chair, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Dropped the journal with a thump and bent to retrieve it.
“I need more information and we need to make a decision.”
“One second.” He wrote again in his journal. He got lost, read from a few pages ago, scanned his notes again from today, and wrote some more. Pronounced, “I’m ready.”
“I found the dog. I have the dog. I discovered a secret the dog was keeping.”
His pen paused. “That’s satisfying news. Right?”
“Not yet. I can tell you what I know but you’ll be dissatisfied. I don’t have all the answers yet and I think that’s ultimately what you’re after. But…you need to decide if you want me to continue.”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
